PostSecret founder Frank Warren chats with me about his popular website

Last week I met PostSecret founder Frank Warren. He was in Raleigh to speak at Meredith College, and I seized the chance to interview him for 30THREADS. PostSecret is a project where people send decorated postcards to Frank’s home declaring their secrets. Some are sad, some are scary and some are strange. But they’re all anonymous and mostly unique. Frank shares a selection of them on his blog PostSecret.com.

I first discovered PostSecret in book form about three years ago. I was browsing at Barnes & Noble on Hilton Head Island and spotted the book’s cool cover (hey, let’s be honest, we judge books by their covers). I sat on the floor and thumbed through the entire book. Later, my best friend told me about the website and confessed that she has even sent in some secrets. Frank tells me it receives between six to seven million hits a month.

Flash forward to Wednesday night. I walk up to the green room and stand outside awkwardly while Frank finishes a conversation. He waves me in and greets me with a firm handshake and a big smile … introduces me to his friends and then is eager to start our interview. I’m posting excerpts from our interview here:

Frank is exactly the type of person journalists love to interview. He speaks in digestable, interesting sound bytes and he actually answers your questions. He’s perceptive, down-to-earth and friendly. During the interview, I mentioned that I asked my Twitter followers if they had any questions for him and that several responded. He took the time to answer each of their questions while I recorded him on my iPhone so that I could tweet the video out back to them.

Then Frank asked if I would take his iPhone with me during the event and record him taking stage. He asked that I post the resulting video directly to his Twitter account. How cool that Frank trusted me with his phone and full access to his 199,000+ followers?! Here’s the clip, which has been viewed 3,155 times as of this writing.

The postcards, e-mails and anecdotes he shared were powerful. I found myself crying several times, and I wasn’t even premenstrual. At the end of the event, I left feeling inspired. I would definitely recommend seeing Frank speak if he ever makes it back to the Triangle again (I believe he spoke at Duke last year).